Hyper-fast Internet coming to parts of Westfield, but it's not from a company you'd guess

For a select group of Westfield residents, the annoyances of video buffering and long download times may soon be a thing of the past.

Westfield Gas and Electric, the city's municipal utility, is launching a fiber optic Internet pilot program that will provide speeds of up to one gigabit per second - the equivalent of downloading a two-hour movie in eight seconds, according to the company's website. Residents and business in the pilot area, which is bordered by Route 20, East Mountain Road and Rachael Terrace, can sign up now, with service expected to start in the third quarter of this year.

General Manager Daniel Howard said the move into public Internet service, which the company has dubbed "Whip City Fiber," is designed to meet increasing demand for bandwith and test the waters for a more ambitious rollout in coming years.

"We're here to help spur economic development which benefits all of our customers right now," Howard said. "The demand for streaming video or streaming anything - the demand on the communications infrastructure is just getting crazy."

The service will start at $49.99 per month, for 200 Mbps speeds; customers who sign up now can get a gigabit of bandwith for $59.99 per month. The speed and price structure are competitive with Google's fiber optic pilot program, currently available in Kansas City, Austin and Provo for $70 per month.

The move into broadband may appear unexpected; the largest Internet providers in the United States, like Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner, got their starts as cable or phone companies, not gas and electric utilities. But Howard said the expansion builds on decades of infrastructure which the company has used for internal communications and limited clients.

For about 20 years, Westfield Gas and Electric has run fiber optic cable to its substations and municipal facilities like schools and the Department of Public Works, Howard said. While he declined to say how much the company was spending on bringing that service to the public, Howard described the plan as an investment based on years of experience with communications.

"We've never advertised it. It's always been a solid system," he said. "It's wasn't at the time a 'business' of ours, but we did it as a value added to our customers."

Howard said he believed the project will be the first fiber-optic Internet publicly available in the city, and added in a press release that speeds could be 10 times greater than what is currently available for Westfield customers. The pilot program will reach about 300 homes and businesses.

Eligible customers can sign up at www.whipcityfiber.com or in-person at the company's 100 Elm Street offices.